March 22, 2012

John Hawkes argues in Slate that we've already been through some bioregineering to make ourselves more sustainable..

snip

...

When the climate warmed by several degrees around 8,000 B.C., it must have seemed at first like a wonderful dream. The glaciers melted. The human population grew and grew. There were more people than ever before, using a broader range of resources and eating a broader range of foods, and they invented beautiful and complex cultures.

That's when these people of the early Holocene did something truly bizarre. They reacted to all this climate change by engineering a new, more sustainable ecology. And they began to foster mutant children who would flourish in an alternate, globally warmed future.

And with lactase persistence and amylase duplications, nature took a different course:

When it comes to cutting meat, natural selection has acted more like an entrepreneur than a eugenicist. Instead of giving us an aversion to meat, it lures us away from meat by offering a milkshake sweetened with corn syrup.

It would be nice if the carriers to compete much more strongly on service and pricing than they currently do... Perhaps this will happen when AT&T comes closer to Verizon in quality - something that seems to be happening in my neck of the woods.

Note - this is just weather rather than climate. It doesn't show climate change, but a higher percentage of events like this does and we've been seeing that for about two decades. So this is an artifact of global warming - as is an increased number of serve storms ... including heavy snowfalls.